Wikimedia engineering 20% policy

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The 20% policy was a policy for all full-time paid Wikimedia Foundation engineering staff. In a nutshell, the policy states that irrespective of other assignments, every engineer or product manager should spend at least one day a week on tasks which directly serve the Wikimedia developer and user community, ideally in ways which can't be easily done by most volunteers, and/or which increase volunteer capacity.

Especially during 20% days, WMF engineering staff should aim to be available on relevant IRC channels and lists, and participate in community activity such as bug triaging processes, ongoing release planning, etc.

The 20% policy is a policy for all full-time paid Wikimedia Foundation engineering staff. In a nutshell, the policy states that irrespective of other assignments, every engineer or product manager should spend at least one day a week on tasks which directly serve the Wikimedia developer and user community, ideally in ways which can't be easily done by most volunteers, and/or which increase volunteer capacity. These are identified as primary tasks below.

Examples of primary tasks that can fall into this category:

Merging reviewed code into the release or deployment branch, and deploying it

Build documentation or examples explaining how to use the MediaWiki code[1]

Secondary tasks may be more suitable for newly hired or junior developers, especially when paired up with more experienced engineers.

20% time is not a replacement for fully dedicated effort supporting MediaWiki releases, code/security review, QA, etc. Instead, it is intended to ensure that we share the workload on tasks which are mission-critical to Wikimedia's success more broadly, and that all Wikimedia engineering staff remain in touch with the larger Wikimedia development and user community through the course of their daily work.

WMF staff responsible for 20% time should check in with the activity lead during the appropriate check-in time prior to the 20% day, bearing in mind the status on this page. We may need to negotiate the priority of the activity.